The Top Ten

After that mammoth list from yesterday, I thought you’d appreciate something smaller. This is culled from The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books Edited by J. Peder Zane. His Top 10 list is derived from the top 10 lists of “125 of the world’s most celebrated writers”* combined:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

*The above list was compiled from the combined input of the following writers:

I was a little bit disappointed in this book. I’d hoped for more obscure revelations; I already knew that Anna Karenina and Lolita are great books! I’ve really only skimmed it at this point but I hope in going back through I can find some surprises amongst those lists.

jb says: I haven’t read it, Diana, and probably won’t. So if you do find any surprises there, it would be really good to hear about it.